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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 135 These thinkers begin with a forceful critique of French racism, cultural assimi- lation, and the failures of departmentalization. They support the need to affirm Antillean distinctiveness and local autonomy. But while recognizing that stig- matized peoples have a legitimate right to recognition, they deplore how cultural claims have overwhelmed, evacuated, or co-opted political space in the Antilles since the 1980s. These cosmopolitans reject any communitarian retrenchment that would close off the Antilles from France or Europe or from its Caribbean and American neighbors. Regarding the fixation with either cultural authenticity or the DOMs’ legal status as political distractions, they do not believe that integral nationalism, let alone state sovereignty, will magically bestow economic devel- opment or democratic self-determination on Antillean peoples. On the contrary, they suggest that Antillean self-management, French citizenship, and transna- tional interdependence may require one another. Impatient with facile rejections of republicanism or universalism (as Euro- centric), these thinkers suggest that support for full French citizenship honors the legacy and condenses the struggles of their slave and activist ancestors who pursued republican liberty and equality against the béké Right, which had long supported autonomy from the French state to protect béké racial hegemony in the Antilles. This is why they can understand political assimilation as expressing an enduring demand for social equality rather than the simple wish for cultural assimilation. We might say that these cosmopolitan Césaireans attempt to universalize republican universality by deracializing it. They challenge its presumptive link to whiteness, France, or Europe even as they also root it in the particular history, conditions, and politics of the Antilles. Their writings suggest that the republican project is an indispensable element of their own heritage even as Antillean free- dom struggles are also indissociable aspects of France’s republican patrimony. For them, the overseas departments constitute the cutting edge of French repub- The Case of Antilla”), Traces, no. 11 (1985): 129 – 51; Giraud, “Dialectics of Descent and Pheno- types in Racial Classification in Martinique,” in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 75 – 85; Giraud, “Sur l’assimilation: Les paradoxes d’un objet brouillé” (“On Assimilation: The Paradoxes of a Blurry Object”), in Michalon, Entre assimilation et émancipation, 89 – 102; Giraud, “L’arbre et la forêt: À propos de quelques polémiques récentes” (“The Forest and the Tree: Regarding Certain Recent Polemics”), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 81 – 83; and Maximin, Pocrain, and Taubira, “Quelle mémoire de l’esclavage?” Mention should also be made of their frequent collaborator, the political scientist Fred Constant. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the important ways in which Edouard Glissant, from Martinique, and Maryse Condé, from Guadeloupe, continue to extend Cés- aire’s legacy as well.